Google Capital likes CrowdStrike for endpoint protection

Next-gen endpoint protection vendor CrowdStrike has landed $100 million in new investments to beef up sales and engineering and continue its push to make anti-virus software obsolete.

The company will hire at least another 70 people to boost its engineering staff as well as expand its operations outside North America. The company has about 210 employees now, says CEO George Kurtz.

The new funding pushes total investment in the company to $156 million and makes it the first security company that Google Capital has invested in. Also participating in this C Round of funding is Rackspace, Accel Partners and Warburg Pincus.

"We've got the resources to accelerate our goals," says Kurtz about the funding.

It will enable the company to continue pursuing the largest enterprises but also to go after smaller companies with its software-as-a-service model for its Falcon endpoint platform. Falcon was designed to make distributing its endpoint agents faster and simpler, and to put management in the cloud, reducing the need for building out infrastructure at customer sites, he says. "With SaaS it's easy to install and once you install, you can do the rest over the phone," he says.

Sometime next year he hopes the company will be able to overcome regulatory requirements that prevent its platform from being acceptable as an alternative to traditional anti-virus software. These traditional platforms are sometimes specified as a necessary check-box for compliance with governmental or industry security standards.

He says that only 40% of attacks use malware as the means of carrying out attackers' goals. The rest consists of adversarial activity that doesn't use malware for which signatures can be written, he says. The better way to detect these attacks is with behavioral analysis like CrowdStrike performs.

The company competes against Bit9+Carbon Black, FireEye, ResolutionOne, Tanium and many others.

Copyright 2016 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.